blog by Vasyl Mylko

Encounter

It was near Central Park in Manhattan, on Avenue of Americas. It was late evening. I was waiting for white lights to cross the street. Noticed a tall man in bright shirt. Recognized him immediately – that man was Peter Norvig – director of research at Google.

I asked for permission to walk with him for a while. We went from 6th to somewhere on 5th avenue, talking about many things. About the man without brain, considered normal by his relatives and friends. About the elephant brain with 3x more neurons than human. About Neural Networks, which are just a new tool for solving specific problems, like differential equations solved other problems earlier; and not replicating/resembling our brain. About The Master Algorithm, and learning to learn, evolutionary algorithms, one-shot learning. About Quantum Computing; especially for Probabilistic Programming, about huge tensor optimization via quantum tunneling. About OpenAI, how Elon Musk and Larry Page hang out in secret apartment in Palo Alto, and what freaked Elon out, to start preventive activity. About Elon-the-businessman, luring/locking professionals to OpenAI and then transferring from OpenAI to Tesla/SpaceX. About the autonomous drones, especially killer drones . About emotions and Affective Computing…

Nowadays Peter is thinking and building a new OS, with natural interface. Think of Her. He still likes the command line interface and bright shirts. With CLI it is obvious – you and machine speak the same language, interactively, it is [almost] natural [for professionals]. With bright shirts – go figure it out yourself…